"The vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, was quite clear about the cause of the Civil War"

[Playingmantis]

2. They made no effort to conceal their motives

They really felt slavery was the very best system in the world.. Much better than what they termed the wage slave system in the North...
One writer described the slave system as a Garden of Eden spoiled by the Devil who walked in as an abolitionist..

Of course slavery was the cause and all knew it.. it was cause of the caning of Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate, the violence in Kansas Nebraska, the attack on Harpers Ferry , the bells tolling in the North when John Brown was hanged and the celebration in the South, the uproar over the Dred Scott decision, the censoring of mail and papers in the slave states, the Committees of Vigilance in the South, and the Fugitive Slave law which Northerners said said "forbid what God commanded and commanded what God forbid." And there was the violence in Boston over the forced return of Anthony Burns and Thomas Sims to slavery under that evil law... One Boston man said he went to sleep as a Whig and woke up a raving abolitionist..

Only a liar or an idiot would suggest that slavery and its expansion was not the cause of the war...